Saturday, August 18 was the first day of our nine-day Baltic Sea cruise aboard the “Norwegian Breakaway”, a big-ass cruise ship decorated from end to end in New York-oriented stuff. Most of the year it serves the New York market, but for some reason did a series of back to back summer 2018 cruises out of Copenhagen in the Baltic Sea. Our itinerary called for us to stop off in Berlin (which is well inland, requiring a multi-hour train trip at the start and end of the day), Tallinn (Estonia), St Petersburg (Russia), Helsinki (Finland), and Stockholm (Sweden). To get that up to nine days, two days were spent at sea not doing a port call, and we spent two days moored in St Petersburg. All in all, nine days.
That Saturday, we got up, had breakfast, packed up and checked out of the Axel Guldsmeden, and took a taxi up to the cruiseport on the north side of town. Boarding was painless and our bags made it to our room within a couple of hours. We poked around the ship, found (oddly enough) a two-lane bowling alley with skee-ball games nearby, got our reservation in for a couple’s massage on the “sea day” we had scheduled after our day in Berlin, and had dinner in one of the “specialty restaurants” on board (the quasi-French restaurant called “Le Bistro”). I couldn’t tell you what the heck we ate, but we got pictures of it all anyway.
Carole is a skee-ball goddess, incidentally.
Curiously, it seems we took few if any actual pictures of our stateroom on the Breakaway. I guess when you’ve done a few cruises (we have done four) the staterooms all sort of start to look alike. Ours wasn’t that big despite being a “mini-suite” — the “suite” aspect of it was mostly in that we had a fairly large bathroom with a hotel-sized shower (cruise ship showers are usually about the size of a small phone booth). More to the point, our “mini-suite” entitled us to access to the “thermal suite”, a large quasi-private area directly below the ship’s bridge with a hot tub, a saltwater pool with waterfalls and jets, a sauna, a steam room, a “salt bath” room, and so on. It was indoors, with large windows looking directly ahead of the ship in the direction of travel. I have no photos of that, either, because we were strongly discouraged from roaming around the area with cameras and cell phones. (Much like the rules in a fitness club locker room.) On those days where we weren’t being rushed around onshore by one tour guide or another, we enjoyed just hanging out in the thermal suite and watching the Baltic slip by. (You can see beaucoup photos of the place on the Cruise Critic website; evidently they were allowed to take photos for publicity purposes on a day guests weren’t there.)
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- The Norwegian Breakaway, complete with Peter Max-designed art on the bow
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- Looking back at Copenhagen from the Norwegian Breakaway
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- The pool deck on the Norwegian Breakaway. Unsurprisingly, in the Baltic Sea it didn’t get as much use as it might’ve in the Caribbean.
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- Hanging out at lifeboat muster
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- Some strange appetizer we got at the quasi-bistro onboard our first night
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- More strange-looking food from the on-board bistro specialty restaurant
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- More strange-looking food from the on-board bistro specialty restaurant
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- Dessert at the bistro
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- Dessert at the bistro
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- Frangelico at the bistro